Official says change comes from fewer than expected Illinois residents accepting offers and more than expected international students enrolling

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released enrollment numbers this week, which show that less than three-quarters of freshmen this fall are from Illinois. (Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune 2012)

The percentage of in-state freshmen at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this fall has dropped to a new low, with about 73 percent coming from Illinois compared with 90 percent less than a decade ago.

After years of justifying the enrollment shifts, even U. of I.'s admissions director, Stacey Kostell, said Thursday that the percentage is lower than what the school wanted. Kostell told the Tribune last year that having in-state freshmen make up 75 percent of the class was the right balance.

The shortfall provides new ammunition for critics who have complained that the state's flagship publicly funded university is educating too few Illinois residents and focusing too many resources on students outside the state, especially from overseas.

Still, Kostell said the decline below 75 percent "wasn't intentional" and resulted from more international students accepting offers of admission than predicted. What's more, the smallest-ever percentage of Illinois applicants accepted the university's offers of admission, "something we are concerned about," Kostell said.

"We will be more cautious next year when we look at admitting international students," she said. "I don't want to be unwelcoming to that population at all, but we are just going to have to plan a little differently. We are going to have to figure it out."

The U. of I. has increasingly become a draw for international students, and the latest figures reflect that. Coming mostly from China, the number of international freshmen increased 29 percent from last fall, climbing to about 1,170 students, or 16 percent of the class.

Kostell said there are 200 more international freshmen than the campus had predicted, which brought the freshman class to about 7,330 instead of the planned 7,100.

U. of I. board Chairman Christopher Kennedy said the university's goal is to keep educating the same number of Illinois residents regardless of how large the out-of-state population grows.

In fact, there are slightly more Illinois freshmen this fall than last fall. But the total number of Illinois undergraduates has declined. While the undergraduate population has ballooned to 32,300 this fall, only about 76 percent, or 24,650 students, are from Illinois — 400 fewer than last year.

The cash-strapped public university — which is grappling with declining state funding as it also tries to keep tuition relatively low — has come to rely on the significantly higher tuition paid by students from across the country and abroad.

"Our goal is not to decrease the number of students from Illinois," Kennedy said. "It will fluctuate each year just because it is hard to predict how many people will accept the invitation to come."

U. of I. at Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Phyllis Wise also emphasized Thursday that the change is partly out of the university's control. She said the campus offered admission to a greater percentage of Illinois applicants than in the prior year — just under 70 percent. But a greater percentage of them turned down the offers.

About 44.7 percent of Illinois residents who were offered admission to this fall's freshman class decided to attend, down from 45.8 percent last year. It's the lowest percentage in at least 10 years — and possibly ever.

"The number who took us up on our acceptance decreased slightly," Wise told trustees at their board meeting Thursday at the Urbana-Champaign campus. "The No. 1 reason students don't come is because of money."

Meanwhile, there were more international applicants than ever before, and a larger percentage of those admitted decided to attend — 27.7 percent, compared with 22.2 percent last year.

The number of foreign undergraduates has more than quadrupled in the past decade and now totals 4,990 students. Nearly 80 percent of the U. of I.'s international enrollees come from China, India and South Korea, and more than half — about 2,600 — come from China alone.

In fact, the U. of I. has more international students overall than any other public university in the country, according to a survey by the Institute of International Education. Including graduate students, there are more than 9,400 international students at U. of I. this fall, university data show.

The percentage of U. of I. freshmen who are from foreign countries is near the top among Big Ten schools, trailing only Purdue University, according to 2011 data from the U.S. Department of Education.

The latest U. of I. figures were released this week, reflecting enrollment on the 10th day of classes. In this year's freshman class, about 21 percent of students are the first in their family to go to college. More than half of the students were ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school classes, and their average ACT score was 28.6, up slightly from last year.

Wise said she was pleased by the makeup of the freshman class.

"What you can see is we are bringing students from a wide variety of backgrounds," Wise said. "We are trying to give them the most transformational learning experience anywhere, public or private."

But the trends are "troubling" to Henry Query, a 1985 graduate of the U. of I.'s engineering school who is now an attorney.

"This is our state university, and you would hope that the mission of the university would be to educate students from Illinois," said Query, of Wheaton. "What I would like to know is their justification for increasing the number of international students. With such high demand from Illinois students and hearing stories about excellent students with top-notch grades that couldn't get in, you wonder why they don't reserve more spots for these Illinois students."